Don't worry, the Chinese are about to land another lander on the moon in December 2018, the Chang'e-4. And this time, it'll be on the far side of the moon, too boot. They already have two small communication satellites, the Longjiang 1 and 2 who are orbiting the moon to provide a telemetry relay and they've already released a number of photographs of Earth with a view not seen from the Apollo missions.
Couple that with the fact NASA is planning to build a permanent space station in Lunar orbit, the " Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway" (originally the "Deep Space Gateway" it was renamed by the US orange potato-in-chief who didn't like the name) in the 2020s and that the first manned flight of the Orion capsule, the "Exploration Mission 2", in 2023 will also be a lunar flyby (originally it was a mission to rendezvous with a 4-meter boulder from an asteroid bought to lunar orbit by the "Asteroid Redirect Mission", cancelled courtesy of the same orange potato) and the fact both SpaceX and Blue Origin have their own lunar plans for the 2020s, and I think we have a new moon race on our hand.
Our species can only benefit from it, as we're waay behind on the space exploration stuff and we currently still have our (metaphorical) eggs in the same basket, a blue marble of a basket we've been callously making more and more hostile to our own survival through mindless consumption, short-termism and just plain laziness...
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Don't worry, the Chinese are about to land another lander on the moon in December 2018, the Chang'e-4. And this time, it'll be on the far side of the moon, too boot. They already have two small communication satellites, the Longjiang 1 and 2 who are orbiting the moon to provide a telemetry relay and they've already released a number of photographs of Earth with a view not seen from the Apollo missions.
Couple that with the fact NASA is planning to build a permanent space station in Lunar orbit, the " Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway" (originally the "Deep Space Gateway" it was renamed by the US orange potato-in-chief who didn't like the name) in the 2020s and that the first manned flight of the Orion capsule, the "Exploration Mission 2", in 2023 will also be a lunar flyby (originally it was a mission to rendezvous with a 4-meter boulder from an asteroid bought to lunar orbit by the "Asteroid Redirect Mission", cancelled courtesy of the same orange potato) and the fact both SpaceX and Blue Origin have their own lunar plans for the 2020s, and I think we have a new moon race on our hand.
Our species can only benefit from it, as we're waay behind on the space exploration stuff and we currently still have our (metaphorical) eggs in the same basket, a blue marble of a basket we've been callously making more and more hostile to our own survival through mindless consumption, short-termism and just plain laziness...